


fury

by ClassyFangirl



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Gen, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClassyFangirl/pseuds/ClassyFangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is sad, then she is numb, then she is not. Cora Hale and the missing nine years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fury

She’s seventeen and she’s no longer sad all the time.

But she thinks being numb is worse.

 

She’s spent nine years running, and it seems nine years is long enough for home to stop feeling like home. It’s so strange- she’ll walk down a street where one of her best friends used to live, and it’s like walking through a stranger’s neighborhood. She doesn’t recognize anywhere or anyone- not even Uncle Peter, not even Derek, and that makes a dull ache go _thud, thud_ in her heart.

  

When she was seven, she made Derek and Laura play Wolf Pack with her.

Derek was fourteen and would roll his eyes and complain that he was, “Too big for that stuff,” but Laura, sixteen, would laugh and punch his shoulder and make him play.

They had a big family, aunts and uncles and cousins all living under one roof, but Cora always liked her brother and sister best of all, even though they were so much older, because they were _hers_. She felt it, deep inside her, this understanding that there was pack and family, and then there was Mom and Laura and Derek. All of it- Mom brushing her hair, Laura having pillow fights with her, Derek getting grumpy and telling her to go away -it made her heart swell with love.

She misses that.

  

On the day of the fire-

(For three years she couldn’t think about that day without crying. For four years she couldn’t think about that day without silently burning from the inside. For the last two years she hasn’t felt a thing.)

On the day of the fire, she was waiting for Derek and Laura. They were supposed to pick her up from school, but she was eight and impatient, so she barely waited ten minutes before heading to the high school to find them first.

She found out, by tugging on teachers’ shirts and looking sweet, that Derek and Laura had already left, so Cora decided to head home. She’d stop halfway there and wait for them, make them apologize for being late to pick her up and bribe her into not telling Mom.

Cora sat at the edge of the woods for what felt like forever. She waited and waited and _waited_ and just when she decided she’d just go home and tell Mom that Derek and Laura forgot all about her (they’d be in _so much trouble_ ), she started to smell smoke. A _lot_ of smoke, more than she’d ever smelled before- it filled her nostrils and made her cough and gag. There was another scent, one she didn’t quite recognize, but parts of it smelled like her pack, like her family.

(The smell of burning flesh is one she knows intimately, now.)

A hideous wave of nausea washed over her, horror and instinctual understanding, and she began to run. That was all she did for miles upon miles, until her legs gave out beneath her- she ran until she was two towns over and passed out behind a gas station.

And then she kept running, and she hasn’t stopped ever since.

 

She used to steal out of necessity, and now she does it out of habit.

Cora goes to the gas station, intending to buy a soda (actually _buy_ one) and she’s halfway back to Derek’s shitty apartment when she realizes she stole two bottles of soda, a pack of gum, and a pack of Reeses.

She frowns- she hadn’t even _noticed,_ just went on instinct and took. It’s too bad, but she has trouble really blaming herself. It’s just something she’s so used to doing, breaking the habit seems impossible.

Cora tosses the Reeses to Peter, who catches it without looking. He glances at the package and smiles. “You remembered,” he says.

She hadn’t at the time, but now, yes, she can look back and fuzzily recall Peter eating the candies almost all the time. “Yeah. Guess so.”

Peter quirks an eyebrow at her, and he is insinuating with his eyes, one of his greatest talents. Cora shrugs and doesn’t feel guilty. 

(She goes back to the gas station that night and leaves a five dollar bill on the counter when the cashier’s back is turned. She’s out the door by the time he sees it.)

  

She picked pockets and snagged cash where she could and traveled by bus up to San Francisco. Why San Francisco, she’s not sure- it seemed largely inoffensive to her, and it’s far away from Beacon Hills.

She stayed in San Francisco for a year, then found herself in rural Oregon. That’s where she spent the next eight years, letting the wolf guide her. She would hunt often, eating rabbits and sometimes bringing them to town to sell.

She remembers walking into a hunting goods store and dropping five rabbits onto the front counter. She can only imagine how she looked to the man working- a nine-year-old girl, with matted, tangled hair, clothes that were too short but hung off her skinny frame, handing him a pile of dead rabbits with a deeply serious expression on her face. 

“How much do you want for them?” she asked.

The man paused in his attempt at taking in her image to look the rabbits over. “Not exactly a neat job,” he said. “Pretty small wounds, but a lot of blood. I don’t think I’ll get much for the coats, but the meat looks fine.” He chuckled, as though she, as a young girl, would be horrified at the idea of rabbit meat, like he’d already forgotten that she’d dropped them on his counter. “Some folks like it, you’d be surprised. Eh- thirty dollars, what the hell.” He handed her the cash, which she took gratefully.

Cora turned to leave, and the man said, “Wait, kid-”

She stared at him. “What?”

“I just...you need anything? Food, supplies...place to stay?”

She was quite happy where she was, actually. The McCurdys’ summer cabin was dusty and rather cold for the nine months out of the year she could stay there, but it was comfortable, with a soft mattress. During the summer, she lived in the open woods, half feral. “No, sir. I’m just fine, sir.”

The man looked hesitant to let her leave, but he nodded. “All right then, kid. See you around, I s’pose.”

  

Being Derek Hale’s sister is _exhausting_.

Cora is not all that interested in going to the mall, or whatever it is normal teenagers do, but god, a break now and then wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Would it be so awful to take a nap?

She gets it, okay, she does, she understands that there is a lot of shit going down, and she doesn’t like it one bit either, but she swears she got more downtime as an orphan criminal on the streets of San Francisco. She just wants to sit down and _breathe_ now and then.

Then Cora sees the sadness in Derek’s eyes, and she takes a deep breath and keeps going. Running, still.

 

In Oregon, it was the beginning of summer, and Cora was clearing out before the McCurdy family showed up. She was packing her things- a sleeping bag, her three outfits, the hairbrush she begrudgingly made use of before her trips into town -when she heard an unfamiliar _click, click, click_ of nails on wood.

Kali smiled and said, “ _Got_ you,” and Cora’s life changed again.

 

She was kept in that bank, hidden from the moonlight, and it came close to driving her mad.

She was kept separate from the other two, the girl and the boy, but listening to them kept her same. Listening to them made her so sad, too, but if nothing else, it made her want to live.

She’d listen to them, listen to the boy tell stories- he wasn’t great with words, but he did his best and made the girl laugh sometimes. “Remember- remember when Isaac was _so sure_ he could convince Mr. Harris that his ‘paper’ was a serious study on chemistry, and that he deserved extra credit for it-” And the girl would laugh and laugh until she had to cough, the laughter painful to her dry, aching throat.

She listened to them whisper, “I love you, I love you,” back and forth, feverishly, like a final prayer of the damned.

She listened to the girl die fighting.

Boyd’s death hurt twice as hard as it would have if she hadn’t heard them for all those months.

 

She realizes, in the middle of a fight, blood trickling down her chin, that she is not numb.

She is _angry_ , and it lights a fire in her.


End file.
